Destiny, A Day 1 Review

Mephisto Mori/ September 9, 2014/ Video Games/ 0 comments

Wall of Text Incoming (Skip to the Bottom for the TLDR Version):

Most people made up their minds about Destiny when they heard the words “Bungie” and “New FPS.”  For the skeptics and those that withheld judgement until the game was actually released, the following is for you.

I don’t hate Halo.  Scratch that.  I didn’t hate the original Halo.  I automatically hate franchises that milk a stagnant IP into oblivion.  The more you add numbers and words after a colon the more difficult it becomes to impress me.  The more I ask “why couldn’t this have been a brand new game?”

Thankfully it only took Bungie four trips up the stagnant IP stream to answer that question.

Destiny is a competent next generation Sci Fi shooter.  It borrows heavily from the tried and true formulas of its predecessors.  And that’s not a bad thing.

Seriously, it’s not.  To it’s merit Destiny doesn’t reinvent the wheel here.  A lot of the legwork has been done by other games.  In particular three other games: Borderlands+WoW+Halo.  We, as a community, need to just admit that and move on.  It’s the Dances with Smurfs things all over.  The comparison is obvious and tired and beside the point.

The ultimate success of Destiny is that it trims the fat from previous attempts at a similar product.  There’s no wasted energy and most importantly it doesn’t “feel” the same.  This is a new experience.  This is what an online FPS with Quests and Raids and PVP should feel like.

The reason it works is almost too simple: the FPS comes first.  There are classes.  There are quests.  But the gunplay is number one.  The classes don’t trivialize or take-away from the competitive FPS or Coop but rather nudges the gameplay in the direction of your personal preference.

And I must stress that the gunplay, the FPS part, is very well developed.  Weapon balance and variance, along with responsiveness and targeting are above what I’ve come to expect from a console shooter.  I’d even posit, this might be the first shooter the PC master race might need to look into owning a console for.  A bold statement, I know.

“There’s a lot here, Andrew, we know you hate games that try to do too much.  How’s the other stuff?

Coop, PvP, and story are all well-balanced with each other and inserted into the MMO shell.  I might even say it takes the best part of all those things without ever forgetting that you’re playing a first person shooter.  The landscape and goals simply change.  Sometimes you’re with your friends, sometimes you’re against people, but you’re always shooting guns.

I’m not going in depth into each element but I do want to highlight a couple.

This is a multi-player shooter that is fun to play alone.  Borderlands, Left 4 Dead were boring without your friends.

It captures the best part of an MMO, which is letting me stand around a social hub (The Metaphoric Orgrimmar/Dalaran) so that people can run past me and admire how sweet I look.  But it cuts out the worst part – chat.  While I stand around looking awesome, I don’t have to read or hear constant and unfiltered internet fuckwaddery.

The greatest flaw of the game, surprise the story, is hidden by the game’s greatest strength – the gameplay.  The plot is not as prominent as it should be and is offensively generic.  All the narrative about guardians, fate, and human extinction falls flat.  I struggle to care about the cut scenes involving Galactus coming to devour the earth told by some fucko in a space nurse outfit.  Then the gameplay saves it.  I fight a huge boss, duel an alien gunship, and raid a moon base and am reminded of how epic Destiny is supposed to be.

There is a big win in the storytelling department, however, and I’m talking about the mother fucking Dinklage.  Peter Dinklage (best known for his role in Knights of Badassdom) superbly voice acts your robot companion and is one of the few examples of an expositional character done well.  In other words, he’s a better Cortana than Cortana.  As you explore and murder robot aliens, he narrates.  The commentary is flavorful and fills in the gaps in story, history, and just about everything else.

Destiny1

The Point (You can stop skimming now):

Destiny doesn’t do anything completely new.  It can be compared to a lot of things if you feel like being a dick.  It does, however, execute a plethora of previously incompatible game elements with a balance we haven’t seen before.  There’s finally a good FPS MMO.

Here’s a comparison you may not have heard.  It reminds me of Golden Eye for N64 in a spiritual way.  I had tons of fun both by myself and with my friends and neither experience felt lesser to the other.  Just different.

Destiny is that feeling times four and for a new generation of console. It’s the highest value in a game this generation by a large margin.  And that’s saying a lot because I’m still playing The Last of Us (Remastered).

Now can we, the gamer community, finally shut up about Halo?  It’s time we put that game in the category of politics and religion and move on.

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